Xiaohan Fu

PhD Student
San Diego, US
xhfu@ucsd.edu

About Me

I'm a PhD candidate at MESL of UCSD CSE, advised by Rajesh K. Gupta and Earlence Fernandes. I obtained my bachelor degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

My research interest spans widely, including CPS-IoT (smart buildings in particular), security, privacy, and applied cryptography. I missioned myself to help the general public embrace the utility and productivity of evolving technologies such as AI, smart hardware, etc. without being worried about various security, privacy, and safety issues including but not limited to ubiquitous surveillance, personal info leakage, and data misusage.

News:

  • Imprompter is covered by WIRED and acknowledged by Mistral AI (9-13-2024)!

  • Our recent work Playground was one of the 🏆best paper finalists🏆 at ICCPS24!**

Education

Jul 2021 - Present
PhD Student in Computer Science
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Sep 2019 - Jun 2021
Master Student in Computer Science
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Sep 2015 - Aug 2019
Bachelor in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Shanghai Jiaotong University

Interests

Operating Systems
Secure & Privacy
Cryptography
CPS-IoT / Smart Buildings

Selected Research

Misusing Tools in Large Language Models With Adversarial Examples
advised by Earlence Fernandes and Taylor Bert.
Jun 2023 - Present
#LLM
#Security

LLMs are being enhanced with the ability to use tools and to process multiple modalities (and formulate agents). These new capabilities bring new benefits and also new security risks. In this thrust of work, we show a novel threat model where an attacker can use automatically generated adversarial examples to cause attacker-desired tool usage. For example, the attacker could cause a victim LLM to delete calendar events, leak private conversations and book hotels.

Press(WIRED)
Website (Imprompter)
Smart Building and Sensing
With Jason Koh, Dezhi Hong, Rajesh K. Gupta, and Gabe Fierro.
Oct 2019 - Present
#Smart Building
#Operating System

The recent advancement in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIOT) has brought significant productivity and utility enhancement across all walks of life. However, safety and security concerns and usability challenges have prohibited the wide adoption of AI-powered smart "things" in large-scale real-world systems. My research aims to close this gap by enabling secure and safe interaction with Cyber-Physical Systems in a user-friendly manner. Smart commercial b ...

ICCPS24 Paper (Best Paper Nomination)
BuildSys20 Poster
Code
BuildSys23 Paper (BEAR)
RLEM22 Paper (B2RL)
Sensys23 Paper (PILOT)
Context-Aware, Continuous Authentication Using Biometrics & Fuzzy Extractors
With Rahul Chatterjee, Varun Chandrasekaran
Jun 2020 - Present
#Security & Privacy
#Cryptography

In our work, we deviate from the status quo and show how users can authenticate themselves using biometrics whilst. We utilize primitives from cryptography -- namely fuzzy extractors -- to ensure that there is no requirement to perform template matching (of a template stored in the clear) on trusted hardware.

Improving gVisor Memory Subsystem Performance
Jan 2020 - June 2020
#Operating System
#Virtualization
#Open Source Contribution

In this project, we analyzed the performance of the gVisor memory management subsystem, starting from benchmarking malloc and ending up focusing on MMAP. We further profiled MMAP performance within gVisor and identified its bottlenecks. We proposed an optimization in the free page searching algorithm of virtual memory space within gVisor (from O(N) to O(logN)). This optimization patch has been merged into production.

code
slide
report
Last Updated on Jun 1st 2025